Alison Mosshart is a member of not one but two rock groups: She’s long been lead singer of the Kills, next to Jamie Hince, and is also part of the Jack White-led supergroup the Dead Weather. Mosshart is also an accomplished artist and author.
Her latest project combines many of those passions: a multimedia book, CAR MA. The 500-copy limited edition sold out earlier this summer, so Mosshart is re-releasing it just in time for Christmas. The love letter to autos is a fitting work from the daughter of a car dealer. “It’s all about traveling and being on the road and automobiles and art and music. It’s my life in a book, really.”
When she’s touring, Mosshart can log up to 500,000 miles in the air each year; when she’s not working, she merely flies between her homes in Los Angeles and Nashville. “I always keep my plane tickets, and we just finished a three-year tour last November, so I came home and they were piled literally up to my knees,” she says. “I keep them all in cigar boxes, and I have tons of them—though now they use that weird laser print; like receipts, they just vanish. So I’m going to have no record of where I’ve been.”
The only supplement you need when it’s hard to eat healthfully on the road ...
Green Vibrance supports you living your best vampire life. An artist friend of mine, Dana Louise Kirkpatrick, suggested this stuff to me. I was at a Shepard Fairey exhibition with her in L.A., and I was just destroyed from touring. Food situations can be difficult when you’re on the road and on planes, or trying to get dinner in towns where everything closes before you get off stage. It’s easy to go days without a decent healthy meal. If I have a packet of this a day, I’ll get more bang for my buck, vitamin- and mineral-wise … a fighting chance of not becoming gray and malnourished.
… but pair it with this vitamin, and Mosshart swears you’ll never get travel-sick again.
Berocca is an all-purpose wonder disk, an orange, fizzy, vitamin C frisbee. I lived in London for a long time, and I started seeing a [doctor] and, he was, like, “You know what, Alison? You really should drink this every day.” I was 25, and he said if I did that I’d never get sick. That was an overstatement, but [15 years later] I rarely, rarely, rarely get sick. He was on to something. It’s great for hangovers and combating fatigue. I take it with sparkling water because then it’s twice as fizzy. And it’s great to mix with tequila and soda water, too, if you feel like being healthy and having fun at the same time. That’s what you discover when you’re having a party at 6 a.m. in the morning at your house, and you’ve run out of mixers. Delicious. Game over.
Her favorite city is in Croatia—and no, it’s not Dubrovnik.
On tour, I love having a day off in Zagreb, Croatia. It’s a great walking city. I’ll walk all day and stop to write and people-watch. The Museum of Contemporary Art is great there. The parks are expansive and pretty. The Esplanade hotel is gorgeous. The people are kind. Go to the food market. Ride a bike. Get lost. Drink Croatian wine. Go to the art deco shopping mall. Enjoy a cigarette with your coffee—indoors, like our ancestors did. And there’s just a great music scene there, and they’ve got great music festivals there. To me, Zagreb feels like a sanctuary.
She buys the same, very personal, very tacky souvenir everywhere she visits.